Rapid Descent On The Way To The Finish Line?

With the Tour de France hitting the Alps tomorrow, we reach some of the toughest challenges and yet I am already mourning the loss of having the Tour on in a few days. Weird how we think.

I bring this up because I am beginning to feel that way about the first book of the YA trilogy. I still hope to have the first beta version by the end of the month.

How has the name change for my main character gone? Well, the last time I asked the question: How long will it take me to type the wrong name when I start writing again?

THERE HAVE BEEN __11_ DAYSSINCE A WORKPLACE ACCIDENT

I guess the name change is going quite well, thank you very much. (grin)

While Book 1 Edit Pass 2 is really all about names of people and places, I can't help fixing other things, of course.

Out of control with the -ed endings (grin):

She sliced off half of her pickled, stabbed it and placed it on Anaulka’s plate.

And then there was the mistake where for a moment I thought I'd gotten rid of three days of file edits. The CMD DOS box command was supposed to be

xcopy . e: /d:7-14-2015

but I left it without the "." !!! Whatever Windows thought it was doing, I had continued the error across the main directory and two backups, dammit. However... it wasn't that bad, because I do save often, and actually only lost two short scene bits. Which I was able to recreate without incident.

Still, you can never be sure when a file disaster will come. Recheck the dates before you start dumping the latest files across your backups. (grin) This is real world stuff, folks.

I will suspend Book 1 Edit Pass 2 at the end of the first actual book and go on to the readability Edit Pass 3. And then we'll have something to show a few of you.

New Researches: Stonehaven/Stonehive, Scotland. The Jacobite rising of 1715 (also referred to as the Fifteen or Lord Mar's Revolt). The Scottish Crown Jewels. The Stone of Scone: An Lia Fàil. Dunsinane Hill. John Erskine, Earl of Mar. The Act of Grace and Free Pardon, 1717. The Catskills -- The old-timers in the Catskills describe our soil type as "two stones for every dirt" -- Shandaken and Phoenicia. Scandinavian migration to New York. Interestingly, the first ship of Norwegians in 1825 were bound for Orleans County. I was born in Medina NY in Orleans County, founded in 1817 and along the Erie Canal. I remember the founding date because I had to learn what the word sesquicentennial meant in 1967. (small-town-grin) The so-called 'Iron Ration' comprised an emergency ration of preserved meat, cheese, biscuit, tea, sugar and salt carried by all British soldiers in the field for use in the event of their being cut off from regular food supplies. The Iron Ration in the US Army in WW I led to the development of the A, B, C and D rations. Is overfarming one word or two? Well, it is used as one word in the New York Times... so good enough for me.

The shiny counters have crept up to:

Book 1 Page Edits (Pass 2)

Remember that in my odd accounting "Book 1" has ended up the whole first trilogy. So if you only look at the first book, ends on page 346 of the main work file, you get:

A Princess Of The Lost Kingdom Page Edits (Pass 2)

See? MUCH more progress! (moving-the-goal-posts-grin)

The Lost Kingdom YA Project Version 1.13 (07-21-15 Tu, 1583 pages)

Book 1 Part I (91,347 words)

And... I've screamed through the 90,000 word mark in the first book, so I upped the target to 95,000 words. For the moment. This damned sucker is going to be a 100,000 YA novel no matter how hard I try to make it under 80,000 words. (evil-grin)